Tech News: LG Hanging Up On the Phone Business?

Let's get into it. One of the gadgets that got a lot of attention at c e S was LGS rollable phone, and I've mentioned it on past episodes, but in brief, this is a phone that can extend its frame and grow to more of a tablet kind of size, and the screen rolls out to expand with the frame, kind of like a window shade being pulled down. It's all made possible by flexible oh LED screens and circuitry, and that's pretty cool. We've seen similar technology with rollable televisions,

for example. So it's too bad that LG might be getting out of the phone business entirely. Now, I should stress this is something that might happen, but isn't guaranteed to happen. An internal memo in l G from the company's CEO had acknowledged that it's possible LG will need to extricate itself from making smartphones. This same CEO, Kuon Bong Yok, assumed the role of CEO in tw with a promise that he would return the smartphone division to

profitability by twenty twenty one. You see, LGS smartphone division has been seeing losses year over year for more than five years in a row, with the company pouring five billion dollars worth of resources into the division. Quan's original plan was for the company to push phones with a real wow factor to them. I hate that term, but one of those phones was one called the Velvet. That's pretty weird. It's a phone that actually has a case, and the case contains a second screen, So the case

is a folding case. When it's closed, the screen of the smartphone is largely not visible. You can still take phone calls with the case closed, but you can't really interact with the smartphone. So you open up the case kind of like a book, and that includes a second screen that's to the left of your phones screen, and it increases the amount of touch screen real estate that you have. That one is an odd one, but it doesn't really stand up to the oddness of the wing.

This is a smartphone that has a swivel screen mounted on top of a second screen. So I see you like screens on your screens. You can have one of them in landscape and one in portrait. So you you twist the top screen and it goes horizontal and the bottom screen stays vertical, and it kind of looks like

you're holding an upper case t in your hand. It allows you to do stuff like watch a video in landscape format so wide screen format, and maybe brows Twitter or or look up information about the movie you're watching in portrait format beneath it, so it's like a dual screen phone, just in a very interesting orientation. Um or Heck, the rollable phone is another great example of a phone

that's supposed to be capturing this wow factor. But it might just be that LG cannot carve out a space in a very crowded market place with lots of other brands there. Samsung and Apple really dominate the high end market for smartphones, Huawei has a pretty good lock on budget smartphones, and there are a few other companies that also have a decent share in that market, and LG just couldn't command enough market share for the division to

be profitable. On a personal note, one of my first smartphones was the LG Nexus five Android phone, and I think it probably makes sense from LGS perspective to get out of a market that is pretty saturated and focus on other businesses that are probably more profitable. But as a consumer, I'm sad if LG does decide to get out of smartphones because it will also mean fewer options

for people who are shopping for their next phone. More options tends to be better for your consumer, and seeing a big player getting out of the market can often lead to fewer choices and fewer innovations in the space. Let's hope that doesn't happen. We don't know if LG actually is going to withdraw from the smartphone business, or if the leadership team you know, does decide to do that, how that's going to affect the employees, or what the

timeline might be. We do know the LG is pledged to find diff positions for about sixty percent of those who will be affected, which sounds kind of ominous for the other forty percent, But as some reporters have pointed out, there's a lot of functional knowledge stored in that group of employees. So LG might want to hold on to as many of them as they possibly can, and hopefully

we won't see massive layoffs in the future. Earlier this week, the world learned about the people former President Trump pardoned in his last few days in office. One of those people is Anthony Lewandowski. Longtime listeners of tech stuff may have heard me talk about this guy before. He is an engineer, one that even his harshest critics referred to as a brilliant engineer who focuses primarily upon technologies related

to self driving cars. He was part of Google's self driving car initiative that would eventually evolve into Weymo, and while he was at Google, he had a bit of a reputation for some ethically questionable leadership decisions. He would leave Google to found his own company that centered on autonomous trucking, and Uber would acquire that company not too

long afterward, bringing Lewandowski on board with Uber. Meanwhile, back at Google, company representatives suspected that Lewandowski had left Google with thousands of documents related to trade secrets and that he was potentially using those to build out Uber's own

self driving initiatives. Google pursued legal action, Uber fired Lewandowski because Uber was legally required to defend Lewandowski due to the employee agreement he had signed, and the Uber then claimed that they were unaware of the theft, and ultimately Lewandowski would stand trial for the theft of trade secrets. He was found guilty and sentenced to eighteen months in prison.

Trump pardoned Lewandowski, who never spent a day in prison because his sentence had been indefinitely delayed due to the COVID outbreak. And something else I always want to add when I'm talking about Lewandowski. He's also the founder of a religion that worships a future AI. In other words, it's a religion that anticipates the creation of an artificial intelligence system advanced enough to be seen as a deity, and it's called Way to the Future. Anyway, I'm sure

we have not heard the last of Lewandowski. This next story is an odd one because of all the irony in it. In fact, this episode's got quite a bit of irony. We will not have an irony deficiency. Okay, so let's see if I can get this straight. Google has placed one of its employees under investigation. That employee is Margaret Mitchell not the author of Gone with the Wind, but rather a member of Google's team that is dedicated

to ethics and artificial intelligence. Now investigating an ethics specialist for wrongdoing certainly seems ironic, though the cynical among us might point out at the various ethics committees in political circles are you know, questionable, and we might make snide comments about those as well. But in this case things get even more thorny. Mitchell is suspected to be involved with the copying and sharing of thousands of internal files

that were sent to external accounts. Axios ran a report stating that Mitchell was using automated search functions to crawl through her messages and pull out any instances of communication involving the discriminatory treatment of another former Googler, Timnant Gebrew. Gebru had worked with the AI team before she was fired.

Gebrew has claimed that she was fired after she criticized Google's lack of diversity and general failure to address diversity problems properly, something that Google executives say, that's just not the case, that's not why we fired her, and so, at least at first glance, this appears to be a case where a Google employee concerned about the firing of a fellow Google employee began pulling evidence together to support the narrative that the fired employee was sacked in a

discriminatory way, and now the company is investigating her for doing that. It's not exactly a good look for Google on the surface, though, of course, there could be a lot more going on here than what I'm aware of. Google employees continue to pressure the company to make some big changes, and the move to unionize is continuing as well. Is this another example of the company trying to lock down dissent or is their justification for the firing of Gebrew?

I don't know, but I promise I will continue to follow up on this story. Good news for Netflix shareholders. The company announced this week that it had more than two hundred million subscribers worldwide and that it is bringing in enough revenue to cover the expenses of the original slate of films and TV series that it produces each year. Previously, Netflix had to take out loans to cover those kind of costs, which measures in the billions of dollars per year.

The projections suggest Netflix will break even by the end of one shareholders might have share buy backs to look forward to, as the company has suggested it might use the cash on hand to purchase shares. The company also plans to maintain a significant amount of debt, like between ten and fifteen billion dollars, so, in other words, not using its profits to pay all that debt off. That

is a heck of a credit card statement. The announcement jolted Netflix's stock value, which climbed more than twelve percent after the announcement. Meanwhile, here in Georgia, some municipalities are suing Netflix, along with Hulu and a couple of other streaming services. And this isn't an effort to lump streaming services into the same sort of category as cable TV, something that is under more regulation than streaming services are.

The law in question is the Georgia Consumer Choice for Television Act, which places a requirement on video services, and it's a franchise fee that all video services like cable TV are supposed to pay to local governments within Georgia, unless those services are part of a larger internet service bundle. This seemed to create a pretty big disparity. For example, the NBC streaming service Peacock plus could be bundled with parent company Comcasts I SP services and thus escape the

franchise fee. That way, the same could happen with HBO Max and A T and T s I s P bundles, but Netflix, which isn't affiliated with an I s P, wouldn't have that opportunity, and since the law only exempts the bundles from franchise fees, Netflix would have to pay up, which would undoubtedly lead to higher subscription prices for viewers. On the flip side, the fees go to local governments

and help fund various governmental functions and services. But companies like Netflix of object to this understandably, and they point out that streaming services are fundamentally different from cable TV services on multiple fronts. It's likely this will all have to be decided in court, and the outcome is far from guaranteed. As we've seen many times, it's hard to predict how courts will interpret laws when the case also

involves technology that the court might not fully understand. Speaking of massive companies that generate tons of content, let's talk about Viacom CBS. For a while now, CBS all Access has been the go to streaming source for stuff like new Star Trek properties. But soon that service will sunset and from the ashes of CBS All Access will rise the phoenix of Paramount Plus. Now this isn't super new news. We knew this was coming back in but now we know.

The date of Paramount Plus is launch March fourth here in the United States. That's also when Latin America will get the service. Australia will get it sometime in the middle of one, and Canada gets the name Paramount Plus on March four, but won't actually get all the Paramount content until some other time later in and I have not yet seen a date for that, so I'm sorry Canadians.

The news service will include not only all the CBS content that was previously on All Access, but also stuff from MTV, Comedy Central, VH one, and b ET, among other channels. There will be new original content coming out on the streaming service beyond just you know, the Star Trek stuff. There's a series that will be based on The Godfather, for example, and that could be pretty interesting. I'm actually a pretty big fan of the first two Godfather films, and the series behind the Music from VH

one is going to make a comeback as well. I'm not certain how much the Paramount Plus service will cost yet. CBS All Access was five per month if you didn't mind having ads in your service, or you could pay for an ad free subscription per month, but I assume Paramount Plus will probably be a little more expensive, but there's no announced pricing schedule at the time of this recording. Well, we've got more to talk about in tech news, but

first let's take a quick break. One of the big tech news stories toward the last few months of twenty twenty was how the co founder of the massive company Ali Baba Jack Ma went missing, at least from the public eye. He gave a speech in October of twenty twenty that criticized government regulations just before an Ali Baba affiliate company called ant Group was scheduled to have its

initial public offering. Side note here, I'm pretty sure that in the past I reported that it was Ali Baba that was holding its i p O, which was my mistake. That was incorrect. Ali Baba had already had its i p O long before this was a financial affiliate company

aunt Group. Well, shortly after this critical speech, the Chinese government, specifically the regulators blocked that I p O for Ant group and regulators have really tightened the screws on the tech sector in China in general and Ali Baba in particular. Jack Ma disappeared from view and the rest of the world was left to speculate on what had happened to him. Was he laying low after seeing how the regulators had reacted, Was he actively being held and silenced by the Chinese government.

All sorts of theories bounced around, although I think there was more of an agreement that the exile was likely self imposed as a matter of preservation. But then Tianmu News, a government operated newspaper, published an online piece that included a video of the billionaire giving a presentation to school teachers in a rural part of China as part of a philanthropic event. Ma himself is a former teacher and has dedicated a great deal of time and money towards

supporting educational efforts in China. There was no acknowledgement that Ma had been absent from the spotlight for months, and considering the fact that the man has gained something of a reputation for some pretty flashy public displays, that in itself is pretty interesting. Ali Baba, which has already become a publicly traded company, as I mentioned, saw the value of its shares increase by nine on the stock exchanges

in Hong Kong and Shanghai. Clearly, Ma's absence has had a somewhat chilling effect on the tech sector in China. As for what happens next, I suspect we will continue to see companies push against the boundaries placed around them by the Chinese Communist Party, which tends to try and suffocate any entity that rises to challenge its power in China. Private space industry company space X has a couple of

new just is currently in the Gulf of Mexico. They are a pair of oil rigs, enormous structures designed to conduct deep water drilling, and these two were rated for operations for up to a depth of eight thousand five feet. Their dimensions measure to forty feet by two fifty five ft or about seventy three ms by seventy six ms. SpaceX's plan is to convert these oil rigs into floating

offshore space ports. Elon Musk, the CEO of SpaceX, had previously said the company planned to build that kind of facility in the near future, and the oil rigs appear to be the first step. It will take a lot of work to convert them into functional floating space ports, but hey, the hardest part of the job is already done, because that's naming them, am all right. The names of the two ports are Damos and Foibos, you know, the

moons of Mars. It looks as though these rigs will become part of a truly massive operation in Texas that includ it's not just SpaceX facilities, but also that other big company that Musk is also involved with, that being Tesla. Texas has been a technological center for a while, but in recent months there's been more of a move to migrate the big tech companies over to Texas to take advantage of tax incentives and the like. I can't wait to see what these spaceports will look like once they

are through with their makeovers. Wikipedia, the crowdsourced compendium of human knowledge, recently had its billionth edit in the month of January, you know, for the English language of Wikipedia, I should add, because there are different versions of it. It was for an entry for an album released by

experimental musician alec Empire. It's called Death Breathing but now, or at least as of the time when I was recording this episode, that entry actually now automatically forwards to just alec Empire, So you know, yeah, it was the Billions edit. But we're not going to be precious about it, which I honestly actually find really refreshing, because ultimately it's an arbitrary number when you think about it. But Wikipedia first launched back in two thousand one and obviously has

evolved a great deal since then. There have been various battles between groups of volunteers who edit the site. There have been changes in editorial policy, partly to reverse the trend of people vandalizing entries or posting unverified and sometimes unverifiable passages into different pages, particularly those that are part of emotionally charged debates like political parties or social movements and that kind of thing, and because editors can update

pages over time. A lot of academic and professional organizations, like my old employer, how Stuff Works, had a blanket policy that Wikipedia was never to be used as a referenced source. You could go to Wikipedia to look at the list of references for that article and then follow down those pathways, but the Wikipedia entries themselves were off limits, mostly due to the fact that they could change in subtle or even not so subtle ways with no warning.

So you might cite Wikipedia as a source, and then two weeks later the information you were citing is no longer in that entry. That's not great. Now. I've been pretty hard on Wikipedia in the past, but I do recognize its usefulness. I just continued to suggest people dig further than the Wikipedia article when researching information. So happy

billionth edit Wikipedia. Back in a company called me we m e w E launched a new social networking platform, also called me we, and the sales pitch for this platform is that, unlike Facebook, me we does not have ads, nor does it use an algorithm to determine which posts you will or won't see. Everything will appear in a reverse chronological order on your feed, with the most recent posts of those you follow at the top of the feed, and then descending by order from there, you know, the

way stuff like Twitter and Facebook used to work. It also claims to be more focused on privacy. Since there are no ads, the service isn't monitoring your every action in order to sell that data off to advertisers. Instead, they have a subscription model. There's a premium level that users can elect to subscribe to, or they can use the free service that has fewer bells and whistles. Now, the reason I'm bringing up me we this week is that the site has seen a recent surge in folks

signing up. Two point five million new accounts were made in the last week. Now, by Facebook standards, that is nothing. Facebook has more than two and a half billion active users after all, But considering that back in October twenty twenty, me we had nine million users, a two and a half million surge in a week is really significant. And here's something that I wasn't planning on. I'm actually one

of those two and a half million people. I somehow had missed hearing about me we for years, and then I just came across it by chance. Before I did this episodes, before I saw the article about how many people had signed up in the last week, I just thought, Hey, this seems like it's more in my style than Facebook. I have one friend on their right now, and it happens to be my co host for large nerdron Collider

aeriel Casting. I quit Facebook several weeks ago, and while I don't have access to my friends like I did on the old f B. I do like the approach of me we. I just wish my friends were there. And apparently I'm not the only person that's going through this. As more people have become disenchanted with the advertising strategies of various platforms or how algorithms can elevate misinformation campaigns and lead to radicalization, we may see more people abandon

those older platforms for alternatives. Now. Don't get me wrong, there are going to be plenty of people sharing misinformation on me we as well, but because there's no algorithm to serve that information up to new PEP bowl, you as a user have to go out and seek the people or organizations that are creating the misinformation on your own. You have to follow them. It's not being served up to you on a platter, and that can make a huge difference, as we've already seen with the recent drop

in misinformation campaigns online. Anyway, this isn't a commercial for me we. It's a social platform that most people aren't even using, but it has received some recent attention, so I'm not saying it's going to become the next big thing, but I do expect we're going to see a few social platforms try and position themselves as a more transparent and responsible alternative to the established networks we have out there.

Whether they gain any traction or not remains to be seen, but we should remember that, you know, momentum and inertia are really powerful things. Back in twenty the company Cycraft see y c R a f T published a report revealing that Chinese hackers have been infiltrating high text systems in a project that the cybersecurity field has called Chimera.

They were largely attacking Taiwanese tech companies at the time, uh and this type of attack was classified as an APT or advanced persistent threat, meaning the intrusions were meant to insert ways for the hackers to gain repeated access to systems and information, not just you know, inject malware or something, but kind of a continual espionage sort of thing.

More recently, the NCC Group and fox I T have revealed that those intrusions have been more serious than earlier reports suggested, and include attacks on airlines and affiliated companies, presumably with the goal to scrape data from systems and keep track of persons of interest On behalf of the

Chinese government, which sounds pretty terrifying, right. The hackers were looking for P and R S that stands for passenger name records, and according to security analysts, the way the hackers gained entry into the systems typically relied upon earlier data breaches. So in some of those data breaches, log and information was among the data that was compromised. So the hackers were using those leaked logins to try and gain access to various companies and systems, and then they

branched out from there. They also relied on a penetration testing framework called Cobalt Strike, So in other words, the hackers were relying upon a tool that's usually used to train system administrators on how to detect and stop hacker intrusions. Hopefully, with the publication of these reports, the affected companies will be able to find and shut down hacker access to their systems. All right, let's go with some more irony, but we're gonna stay on hackers. So there's a cybersecurity

firm called malware Bites. This company recently revealed it had discovered an intrusion from the same hackers that infiltrated the company Solar Winds last year. And what's more, this wasn't

connected to the Solar Winds attack, at least not directly. Now, you might remember that with Solar Winds, hackers injected malware into a product called Orion, and when Solar Winds pushed out updates for Orion to all customers that were relying upon that product, the malware hitched a ride and infected thousands upon thousands of systems and companies and government organizations, etcetera. With malware Bites, the intrusion came thanks to a dormant

Office three sixty five security app. Another irony right that the vulnerability came through a security app. Office three sixty five, by the way, is a product from Microsoft. Now we know that thanks to Solar Winds, the hackers had gained access to many of Microsoft's internal systems, and there's a chance that that may have led to the hackers finding the opportunity to take advantage of this otherwise unused Office

three sixty five tool over at malware Bites. As for the Solar Winds hack, analysts say we're still in the very early stages of just assessing the scope of that attack and the number of systems that have been compromised, which means we're still a long way from actually resolving any problems. Well, we have a few more stories to cover before we get to that. Let's take another quick break. On some online platforms, there is a strategy called shadow banning,

and here's how it works. You got yourself a real ne'er do well on your platform. They're always stirring up trouble, causing strife, initiating flame wars, that kind of thing. Now, you could just ban this person, which would likely make your other users happy, but it would also be something that the band user would immediately notice. And maybe that user just goes and creates a different account on your service and just keeps up with the same old garbage,

or maybe you shadow banned them. A shadow band means that to the affected user, the seem normal. They can still access the service, they can still post to it, only no one else on the service will actually see the stuff that this user posts. The messages just don't

show up because the user has been shadow band. A group of researchers wanted to test Twitter's claim that they don't use shadow banning in their moderation strategies, but some users messages were not showing up for other people, and Twitter reps were saying that those instances were just examples of a bug, it was an unintended glitch, but the researchers wanted to investigate that claim, and through their analysis, they arrived at the conclusion that it is statistically unlikely

that the invisible posts are only due to glitches, because the researchers found that the people who are affected by this shadow band glitch were likely to have other friends who similarly had the same problem, which suggests that rather than being random glitches, there is some sort of algorithm that's identifying accounts that the algorithm has decided are posting material that Twitter would rather not show up on its service, and then the algorithm starts to follow the path of

who is this person following and who's following this person using the logic of hey, if this one account is posting really hinky stuff, then I bet the accounts that it follows and the accounts that follow it are likewise doing that. So you wouldn't expect to see that kind of activity. If this were just a random glitch, it would be very sporadic. They would be unconnected. Uh, you know, accounts for the most part, so that's what the researchers

are saying. It's not definitive proof, it's just evidence that supports that there might be some shadow banning actually going on at Twitter, despite the company's protestations. Otherwise, moving on, so in Video released its shield TV product way back in now. This is a digital media player running on an Android operating system, and it can stream games from

a compatible PC to a television. So if you're a PC gamer but you would love to play certain titles on your big screen television, you can use the Nvidia Shield TV to do that. And now you can use PS five and Xbox Series X controllers with that system. In Video recently added support for the new controllers to their product. The pairing process sounds like it's pretty simple, and the Vidio shield TV product can also upscale videos up to four K resolution. That's not quite the same

as running four K natively, but it's still pretty darn nice. Now. I've never had the chance to play on an in Video shield TV, though I did once get a chance to play the original in Vidio shield Portable before that was really an official thing. I think I was at a c E S and it was just kind of secretly being shown off. And I was there in the last day of the show, and the reps that the booth were like, yeah, sure, go ahead and play with it.

I think it had largely been hands off for most of the show, which tells you it pays to stick around at c e s till the last day because people don't really care so much anymore for some reason. Sticking with games. Several game publishers, including Valve, which these days is better known as the company behind the Steam Store, are going to be coughing up some dough to pay fines in the EU. This comes after a nearly two year long legal battle, and at the heart of this

issue is the practice of geo blocking. That is the practice of blocking access to some games in some areas of the EU while allowing access to those games in other EU countries. See the EU doesn't like that too much. The philosophy of the EU is one in which people, businesses, and services are free to move around within the Union as a whole. So having a service that's available in say France, but unavailable in Germany is antithetical to the

euse philosophy. A competition and law makes it illegal for companies to engage in cross border sales across member nations in the EU. This isn't something unique to the video game industry. On a similar note, the EU wants services like streaming video companies to offer the same library of content across all members of the EU, treating it as a digital single market. And while there are complicated licensing agreements that come into play that make this harder to do.

There's also the fact that within the EU, a citizen can choose to relocate to another member nation of the EU, and in that case, you would think that the person should still have access to whatever digital media they had already purchased in their original country. The game publishers all had a reduced fine due to the fact that they were more cooperative with the US approach to creating regulations.

Valve had to pay the whole fine because it had somewhat resisted those efforts and disagreed that they were guilty of violating a law. So Valves find amount to to one point six million euro a princely some Oh and hey, remember when in early Animal Crossing, New Horizons swooped into the rescue for all those Nintendo Switch owners and helped us through the early days of isolation in the Quarantine era. Well, how about you recapture that feeling of joy and community

with a little makeup. Color Pop is releasing a collection of makeup inspired by the popular game, which, as I understand it mostly involves hoarding turn ups until the market reaches critical mass, whereupon you unload them in a frenzy sort of like the movie Wall Street, but with cartoonish

anthropomorphic animals. The collection launches on January, and the images I've seen have all been palettes of various makeup powders and different colors, and each palette is citing a different citizen of the game as the source of inspiration, which you know, is pretty adorable. I'm a favor of it. I don't don't think I'll be wearing any of it.

I can't pull off eyeshadow, guys. And finally, scientists with the University of Bath and the University of Oxford are now using images captured by satellites to look for and track the movement of animals from space. Animals like elephants. So the scientists say that the satellites offer up a new way to count elephants. When paired with an algorithm that analyzes the images and looks for you know, elephant shapes, but like teeny tiny elephant shapes. Because these are satellite images.

This is a much more efficient means of finding elephants than sending aircraft to just crisscross the skies in search of them, and it gives scientists a way to track elephant populations. The African elephant is considered a vulnerable species.

There are somewhere between forty thousand and fifty thousand African elephants in the wild, and the team hopes that this approach can be used to count and keep track of other types of animals in the future with you know tweaks to the algorithm, though I personally hope they never use it to count sheep because otherwise the satellites might go into sleep mode. Dad da da dad da dad. Yeah. Okay, with that terrible dad joke, We're gonna wrap up this

episode of Tech Stuff News Edition. We will be back next week with more news and in the meantime, if you have suggestions for topics I should tackle in normal episodes of tech Stuff, whether it's a technology, a company in tech, a personality in tech, maybe just a trend in tech. Let me know. The best way to reach out to me is on Twitter. The handle is tech stuff hs W and I'll talk to you again really soon.

Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows year